

Processing, archiving and distributing Earth science data
at the NASA Langley Research Center

What is the MISR swath?

The instantaneous swath of any imaging instrument, including MISR, is the width of the region that is actually observed across the track of the instrument at any time during any particular overflight. The instantaneous swathes of the cameras on the MISR instrument vary from 376 to 414 km, but the instantaneous swath of the overlap of all cameras is 360 km. This means that whenever MISR passes exactly overhead of a site, its nine cameras also observe the neighborhood of that site, up to 180 km on either side of the projection of the track of the Terra platform on the Earth's surface. The swath also refers to the entire region being observed by MISR in the course of one particular orbit: in this case, it refers to an area that is about 20,000 km long and 360 km wide.